Opinion: Is democracy imperiled in 2018?

It's an issue well worth pondering: How safe is the world for democracy?

Anti-democratic forces are nothing new. Authoritarian regimes made the 20th century a century of war. Two world wars, the product largely of dictatorships driven by ethnic-racial nationalisms and demands for territorial revision, were followed by more than 40 years of “cold war.”

The era represented an enormous attack on democracy and human rights. The United States and its democratic allies in Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere survived and helped to rescue the world from the pit of authoritarian barbarism.

But now once again democracy seems increasingly less safe.

Regimes opposed to and threatened by its values abound. Repressive strongmen rule Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, China, North Korea, and multiple countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Across Europe, burgeoning pro-authoritarian white nationalist movements spew hatred against democracy, foreigners, and the European Union.

Most alarming, the world’s longtime, largest, and most powerful democracy appears, in a variety of ways, much less willing to champion it.

In 2016, the US elected a president hostile to and markedly uninformed about democratic rule and culture. An authoritarian-leaning Donald Trump pursues an “America First” policy of withdrawing the United States from its role since 1945 and the end of World War II as the world’s chief defender of democracy, human rights, and global cooperation.

Instead, Trump repeats the devastating mistake of U.S. policy between the world wars. Then, America abandoned its Anglo-French allies — badly weakened by World War I — in their opposition to Adolf Hitler’s Germany and thus encouraged them to appease the dictator. Emboldened, he unleashed World War II.

According to The New York Times, Trump is "shaking up the international order to make friends with America’s enemies and enemies out of America’s friends." He’s quarreled recently with America’s Canadian and European allies over trade, treatment of Palestinians, and the Iran nuclear agreement. America comes “first”; it owes friends nothing.

But the relationship with allies is not a one-way street. There’s much the U.S. could lose.

While the US has aided allies significantly financially and otherwise, it’s true also that America’s emergence as a global superpower rests in no small part on the longtime, dependable cooperation of allies in both world wars, the “cold war” containment of Soviet Russia, and recent wars in the Middle East. A vast network of U.S. military bases exists in the lands of allies in Europe and Asia, a key since World War II to protecting America and projecting its power globally.

Equally ill-founded is Trump’s admiration for and effusive praise of dictators and U.S. adversaries, notably Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Much of history illustrates the danger in appeasement of autocrats. It emboldens them to increase oppression of their peoples and/or invade neighboring lands.

Finally, a question exists about the safety of democracy within the U.S. Will the republic withstand Trump’s constant attacks on its rule of law, human rights (including forcibly separating families of migrant asylum seekers), and Trump-critical media?

In 1917, justifying U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson worried “[t]he world must be made safe for democracy.” During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt called America “the great arsenal of democracy.” Amid the “cold war,” presidential candidate Ronald Reagan lauded Washington, D,C., as “a shining city on a hill,” a “city of hope in a country that is free.”

Today Americans need desperately to recall such words and insist the United States return to such examples of leadership and powerful defense of democracy.

Donald M. McKale is the Class of 1941 Memorial Professor and professor emeritus of history at Clemson University. Reach him by email: mckaled@clemson.edu